A marble plaque is seen in St. Peter's square at the Vatican Saturday, May 13, 2006, on the exact spot where Pope John Paul II was shot on May 13, 1981, to, according to Pope Benedict XVI, ''remember from now on that dramatic event.'' A Fatima statue, with one of the bullets which struck Pope John Paul II embedded in it as a memento, arrived in procession where exactly 25 years earlier a Turkish gunman shot and gravely wounded Pope John Paul II who has credited his survival of the assassination attempt to the intercession of the Madonna di Fatima. (AP Photo/Pier Paolo Cito)
There were always rumours that the man who tried to kill the Pope, Mehmet Ali Alca, was an agent for the Bulgarian KGB. He claimed at various times to work for various people, including the Bulgarian KGB, the CIA, the Turkish Mafia, and to have been working on his own. No one will ever really know, however rumors continue to persist that the communists wanted to take JPII down in retaliation for the supposed assasination of JPI at the hands of the CIA (for having removed prominent pro-American clergymen from positions of power and his failure to take a hard-line anti-communist stance).
ReplyDeleteIronically enough, the second assasination attempt on the life of JPII was carried out by a rabidly right-wing Spanish priest who loathed Vatican II and considered JPII to basically be a communist. Go figure.